All posts tagged bruce law

On a fateful night in 2007, UN Special Forces agent Lin (Jackie Chan) is faced with a cruel dilemma: to be with his daughter Nancy in the hospital as she desperately clutches to life in the final phases of leukaemia, or to protect Doctor James, a geneticist who entered the witness-protection program after creating for an arms dealer a biochemical weapon whose formula, in the wrong hands, could bring about international chaos. Doctor James has been targeted by Andre (Callan Mulvey), a soldier enhanced with that biomechanical invention. Having painfully chosen international security over his daughter, Lin barely survives an attack by Andre that claims the life of most of his team. The same evening, his daughter dies. Fast forward thirteen years later, and Nancy is apparently still alive, attending high school under the watchful eye of Lin, who poses as a cafeteria worker at her school. Nancy is beset with recurring nightmares, and little does she know that she is the target not only of Andre and his right-hand woman (Tess Haubrich), but also of Leeson (Show Lo), a thief who found her profile in the files of a successful fiction writer.

Another in a long line of slickly-packaged Chinese propaganda war films, The Warriors was directed by Ning Haiqiang (whose oeuvre includes 2015’s The Hundred Regiments Offensive), is set in 1935 and follows a regiment of the People’s Liberation Army – then known simply as the Red Army – led by commander Huang Kaixiang (Ethan Li), as it races towards a key bridge that has to be taken in order to stop the Kuomintang troups’ progress in the region. It’s an incredibly thinly-written film, with sparse historical detail, entirely interchangeable characters (all stalwart, selfless, heroic, saintly would-be martyrs) given the faintest of backstories, and a constantly solemn, clenched-jaw, single-tear tone that borders on unintentional comedy. This makes the film’s episodic structure – it simply hurtles from skirmish to skirmish – all the more laborious and plodding; the copious action scenes are competently staged (action maestro Bruce Law is to thank for that) but devoid of any emotional pull, narrative momentum or epic sweep. For all the explosions and machine gun fire on display, The Warriors feels like listening to a particularly heavy-handed recruiting sergeant drone on for 100 minutes. *

The fourth film of firefighter-turned-director Yang Shupeng, Blood of Youth follows a young hacker named Su Ang (Oho Ou), who anonymously tips off the police about the remains of a woman buried in the woods near the city of Hangzhou. Detective Zhang (Zhang Yi) discovers the victim was beaten to death almost two decades ago, and starts investigating the events that lead to her death. But at the same time Su Ang also warns the police about a bank robbery about to happen, but just as the robbers led by Shen (Zhou Ziwei) are about to enter the bank, he tips them off too about the presence of the police. His agenda is a mystery, but it may be linked to the fact that a brain injury he sustained during his years in an orphanage is slowly killing him according to his doctor, Han Yu (Yu Nan), especially as he’s not taking the medicine that might save him. And his endgame definitely includes Lin Qiao (Guo Shutong), a young cellist whose libidinous orchestra conductor Li (Guo Xiaodong) is none other than Han Yu’s husband.

Ulterior Motive is Arthur Wong’s first film as a director in 28 years ; his last directorial effort had been the enjoyable, hard-hitting In The Line of Duty 3 in 1987. Not that he has been slacking off in the meantime : Wong is one of Hong Kong and China’s most illustrious cinematographers, having lensed everything from The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Once Upon A Time In China to The Warlords and Painted Skin. We encourage you to have a look at his filmography, it’s a head-spinning list of some of the most gorgeously-shot films in Hong Kong and China. For his return to the director’s chair, he has chosen a noirish thriller about a rich heiress (Qin Lan), whose husband (Archie Kao) and daughter are kidnapped and held for ransom. The cop in charge of the investigation is her ex-boyfriend (Gordon Lam), an acutely intuitive sleuth who quickly targets her father (Simon Yam) as a prime suspect, after finding out troubling similarities between this kidnapping case and one he was involved in 20 years ago, that ended in murder.